How Spam Traps and Blacklistings can impact Email Deliverability

Spam Traps

Spam traps are email addresses used to catch spam. They do not signup to receive email voluntarily and if they wind up on your list. Getting this kind of email address in your list is going to affect your delivery, your reputation or worse… get you blacklisted. Believe it or not, spammers have ways to get around complaint/bounce rates, but they do not have ways to get around sending to spam traps.

Never purchase, borrow, steal or harvest an email list

Confirm new signups to ensure the person signing up owns the address in question

Remove hard bounces

Send on a regular basis

Take Away: Traps addresses are one of the most effective ways of controlling spam today, they are not going anywhere. If you don’t protect yourself, you are at risk.

Blacklistings

Blacklists are used by receiving networks to judge a given IP and/or domain’s reputation. Blacklistings are the result of sending Unsolicited Bulk Email (UBE) to addresses that never asked for it. There are many different blacklist providers out there and some carry more weight in the community than others, so it’s very important you keep your lists as clean as possible.

Take away: If you have a history of being labelled a spammer, there’s a fat chance anyone is going to let you send them anything.